The D Programming Language began as the effort of a single individual, Walter Bright. Bright had extensive experience writing commercial C and C++ compilers and was looking to make a language that was an improvement over C++. The result takes some features from Java (such as classes being references that are garbage collected), as well as features from other languages ( (like a built-in associative array - aka hash, map or dictionary). The standard library of D is notable for its use of ranges, rather than the iterators used for a similar purpose in C++. The name D reflects it's place in the C-syntax family of languages (C, C++, Java, C#). The D effort now includes more people than Bright, with the most notable being C++ author Andrei Alexandrescu (who also has written a book on D).
When fellow (at the time) Seattle area resident Alexandrescu joined Bright on the effort, a decision was made to create a new version of D that was similar to, but incompatible with the original version (now referred to as D1 and D2). This has led to a fragmentation in the D community as some users had an investment in D1 that they weren't willing to forego. As D1 maintenance will end on 12/31/2012, some D1 users began a fork of D1, and after 3 and a half years of development released it in December 2012, calling it Amber. Besides having two versions of the language and compiler, there are two different "standard libraries" for D, one is the primary library for D1, and is called Tango. The D2 standard library is often referred to as "Phobos", but as Tango does not support D2 (although some effort in that direction has been undertaken), and "Phobos" is the library coming from the D2 compiler writers, it is more appropriate to refer to it as the D2 Standard Library. Or rather, since D1 is now considered obsolete by the author, it should be referred to as the D Standard Library.
There was a recent successful fund raising effort, and now a 2nd D Conference has been announced, along with a call for submissions. It will take place April 30th (tutorial day) and May 1-3, 2013 (regular sessions) in Menlo Park, California at the Facebook headquarters (employer of Andrei Alexandrescu, a key D developer).
| Title | Presenter |
|---|---|
| The Future of the D Language - Part 1 | Walter Bright, Andrei Alexandrescu |
| The Future of the D Language - Part 2 | Walter Bright, Andrei Alexandrescu |
| Compile Time Abstraction | Benjamin Shropshire |
| Sofware Transactional Memory in D | Bartosz Milewski |
| DSSS and DSource | Brad Anderson and Gregor Richards |
| Generating Truly Optimal Code | Don Clugston |
| Tools or a New Generation | Cristian Vlasceanu |
| Runtime Libraries | Sean Kelly |
| Hooking Python and D Together | Kirk McDonald |
| Array Slicing and High Performance Systems | Kris Bell |
